For anybody questioning how Russia may change after this weekend’s aborted putsch, it could be price keeping track of Viktor Zolotov, the longtime bodyguard of President Vladimir Putin, who emerged on Tuesday as one of many few obvious winners within the regime’s near-death expertise.
A sometimes gray and sullen determine within the Kremlin retinue, Zolotov, who heads the Russian Nationwide Guard, stepped out of Putin’s shadow on Tuesday to assert credit score for defending Moscow from the Wagner Group, the non-public military that marched throughout Russia this weekend. After assembly with Putin on Monday and Tuesday, Zolotov described how his department of the armed forces, with over 300,000 personnel, stood to realize from the riot. His troops would quickly obtain an arsenal of superior weaponry, he stated, together with tanks, to protect in opposition to related threats to Putin’s rule.
It stays to be seen whether or not any of the Kremlin’s clans can acquire from the Wagner Group’s riot. Its chief, Evgeny Prigozhin, has reportedly gone into exile, his mercenaries ordered to disband. His rivals within the Russian navy have been humiliated by the fiasco, whereas Putin has struggled to save lots of face and regain his grip on energy. However Zolotov, the consummate loyalist, seems to be taking a victory lap and publicly angling for benefit.
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It is perhaps inside his attain. In a speech on the Kremlin on Tuesday, Putin thanked the forces beneath Zolotov’s command for defending the capital alongside the police and different safety forces. “You saved the Motherland from turmoil, and successfully stopped a civil conflict,” Putin informed a gathering of troops and officers, together with Zolotov and different senior commanders.
All of them, from the protection minister to the nation’s high spies, have saved silent in the previous few days, showing meek and exhausted in a gathering with Putin on Monday. The one one sporting a navy uniform at that assembly was Zolotov, who has since change into essentially the most outspoken of Russia’s high brass. On Tuesday, he was the primary senior official accountable the mutiny on the U.S. and its European allies, providing a well-recognized canard for the state propaganda channels to unfold: “The riot,” Zolotov informed them, “was impressed by the West.”
Amongst Putin’s henchmen, Zolotov’s background stands in sharp distinction to that of Prigozhin, the brash mutineer who ordered his males to advance on Moscow over the weekend. A convicted mugger and former sizzling canine vendor, Prigozhin wormed his means into Putin’s circle by a sequence of enterprise offers and a willingness to do the state’s soiled work all over the world, whether or not by interfering in American elections or propping up dictators in Africa and the Center East. Zolotov, a creature of the system and a basic of the Russian military, has spent most of his profession throughout the Kremlin partitions, beginning as a bodyguard to President Boris Yeltsin in 1991 and persevering with in that function beneath Putin.
He first got here to public prominence in Russia in 2016, when Putin created the Russian Nationwide Guard and appointed Zolotov as its commander. The drive, which solutions on to Putin, was designed to place down standard uprisings and inside threats to the regime, a process that Zolotov embraced with gusto. In one in every of his uncommon public appearances in 2018, he threatened to pound Russia’s most distinguished dissident, Alexei Navalny, right into a “juicy slab of meat.”
In the course of the Russian invasion of Ukraine final yr, Zolotov’s forces principally performed an auxiliary function, mentioning the rear behind elite commandos and airborne troops tasked with the conquest of Kyiv. When that mission failed, Zolotov didn’t get almost as a lot of the blame because the spy chiefs and generals who deliberate and executed the invasion. Putin continued to reward the Russian Nationwide Guard at the same time as the remainder of his navy started its retreat from the Kyiv area. “The entire nation is happy with each one in every of you,” Putin informed them on the finish of March 2022, marking a nationwide vacation celebrated in honor of Zolotov’s forces.
Since that point, lots of Russia’s high generals and spy chiefs have been at one another’s throats, struggling to regain momentum within the conflict and to skirt accountability for Russia’s catastrophic losses on the battlefield. Considered one of these feuds resulted in Prigozhin’s mutiny over the weekend, and it ended badly each for him and his rivals throughout the Russian navy.
However for Zolotov, it seems to be like a chance, and an indication of the route that Russia may take. Threatened in Moscow and pissed off in Ukraine, Putin may fall again on the person who has been by his aspect from the start, the one answerable for staving off inside threats to the regime. For Putin, which may appear to be a logical transfer as he steps again from the brink of a civil conflict. For the remainder of the Russian elite, it may herald the start of a purge, one which Zolotov could be more than pleased to conduct with the forces beneath his command.
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